How to add an hcard to your website and improve your local rankings
May 30th, 2010 by hbond
hCards like their vCard counterparts are a wonderful way to share your contact information with the world. From a local search engine optimization perspective they have a small role to play in instructing the search engines where in the world (geographically) you’re located.
An address and contact information constructed as an hCard looks exactly the same to a visitor on your site as compared to an address without the extra markup. To a search engine it’s completely different. Since the content is tagged as an address the search engines don’t have to guess what the content is – they know without question that it’s an address. This is how it helps your local SEO efforts.
For the average person creating an hCard is quite complicated and not likely to be done. However, there is a nice little tool that can help you with it. It’s an hCard creator. Simply enter your contact information into the form fields and then presto – the hCard code is available for you to copy and paste into your website page. I would remove the text reference to the tool – it’s not necessary. If you want to add your address information too you should have a look at this bit of extra code:
You can paste this code into your web page and style it with CSS or simply send it to your webmaster and have them add it for you. There are lots of neat little tricks and hCard enhancements you can make to this too – but that’s for another day. For now you should concentrate on adding an hCard to your website!
Interesting stuff. Thanks for sharing. Never heard of hcards until today.